What is jQuery?

jQuery is a JavaScript library that simplifies JavaScript programming. It helps us to build rich internet applications without writing much more JavaScript codes. This article describes the introduction to jQuery, basic overview of jQuery. Summary of the article:

• What is jQuery?
• History of is jQuery
• Licensing of jQuery
• From where we Can Download jQuery ?
• Features of jQuery
• Why we should use jQuery? 

What is jQuery?
jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library or code which is designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It is written in JavaScript. It is very lightweight. Its main theme is “write less, do more”.

From the jQuery official site “jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers.”

In order to work with jQuery we need to learn some basic knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

History of is jQuery
jQuery was originally released by John Resig in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC.

Licensing of jQuery
jQuery is a free, open source software and licensed under the MIT License. Officially Microsoft has integrated jQuery into their IDE Visual Studio 2010.

From where we Can Download jQuery ?
We can download jQuery from its Official website.

Features of jQuery
The jQuery contains the following features:

• HTML/DOM manipulation
• CSS manipulation
• HTML event methods
• Effects and animations
• JSON parsing
• AJAX
• Utilities
• Extensibility
• Multi-browser

Why we should use jQuery?
jQuery is well written and very compact JavaScript code that increases the productivity of the developer. Writing very small amount of code we can achieve critical UI functionality. Lot of JavaScript frameworks is available, but jQuery is most popular. Many biggest companies on the Web use jQuery (Google, Microsoft, IBM, Netflix)
The advantages of using jQuery are:

• It helps to improve the performance of the site or application.
• It helps to build most browser compatible web site or web application.
• It helps to improved UI related functionality without writing lot of codes.
• It is very faster.
• It is extensible. That means we can extend it to implement customized behavior.
• In order to use jQuery no need to learn fresh new syntax’s.

At present jQuery is widely used in most of the web applications. Because, it is supported by most of the web browsers. It has some plugins that reduce the uses of lot of codes.